KOLKATA, India: Voting in local elections in India’s West Bengal state resumed at hundreds of election centres on Monday after being disrupted by violence that left at least 10 people dead, said the officials.
The state election commission reported seven people were killed on Saturday in election-related violence, and another three died “in post-poll violence” Sunday, Rajiva Sinha, the election commissioner, told media on Monday. Opposition parties claimed the killings were 16.
The election commission called re-election at 697 centres following complaints of electoral malpractice and violence.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has in recent years strived hard to gain a footing in West Bengal — ruled by a communist party for much of its history — as it seeks to expand its reach beyond its Hindi-speaking northern heartlands.
The tough contest is to elect municipal leaders, with more than 200,000 candidates in the running across the state of 104m people. The state has been led by Mamata Banerjee since 2011, when her Trinamool party defeated the communist-led administration that had ruled the state for the prior three decades.
Banerjee, a fierce critic of PM Narendra Modi, has accused his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of attempting to import divisive sectarian politics into the state, which has a large Muslim minority.
The roots of political violence in West Bengal stretch back decades, with police documenting thousands of murders around polls time since the 1960s.
During state polls in 2021 — won categorically by Trinamool, but with a strong BJP showing — several activists from both parties were shot or hacked to death, their bodies sometimes hung from trees as an intimidation tactic. —AFP
